Embodiments of the present application relate generally to dynamic display of clinical information through a user interface. Particularly, certain embodiments relate to chronological and relevant displays of medical studies in an intuitive and fluid manner.
When reviewing a patient's medical history, a reviewing clinician is faced with managing a potentially large amount of information. It should be understood that a patient's medical history may also include presently generated studies that are in a condition for clinical review. For a given patient, there may be studies spannig over a period of months or years. The studies may cover a variety of conditions and/or body parts. The studies may pertain to various clinical areas—e.g., radiology, cardiology, laboratory exams, neurology, pathology, oncology, etc. For radiology and other medical imaging applications, the studies may be generated through various modalities—e.g., CT scan, fluoroscopy, tomography, ultrasound, MRI, etc.
Furthermore, there may be layers of information for each study—e.g., various levels of information such as metadata, high-level study information, and underlying study data. The underlying data may also be stored in a variety of forms—e.g., linked database information, images, movies, text, etc. Given the potentially vast and diverse amount of information for any given patient, a reviewing clinician is faced with a difficult task.
The various patient studies, as a group may be considered horizontal patient information. For a given study, the various layers of information may be considered vertical information.
For a given patient review, a clinician may have to select among the horizontal patient information to efficiently access relevant patient studies. Further, the clinician may desire to efficiently “drill-down” through the vertical layers of a given patient study. It may be inefficient to provide a work-flow for the clinician that requires the manual integration of various data sources, data management applications, and data monitoring scenarios.
Thus, there is a need for efficient management of clinical patient information. There is a need for the ability for a clinician to intuitively browse, select, and review the horizontal and vertical patient information. Furthermore, there is a need for the clinician to manage in an integrated manner, both horizontally and vertically, the patient history information.